To some, jazz is a sound. To others, it’s a feeling or a mood. To still others, it’s an attitude. To me, jazz is busting my rear to get to a club on time, and then finding that the bandleader himself is 10 minutes late. Still, I am hardly the one to wag my finger and shout, “J’accuse!” since I am far from a paragon of punctuality. Nevertheless, when the trumpeter Nicholas Payton finally appeared for his opening show at Jazz Standard on Wednesday night, the band, even with the last-minute substitution of the pianist Robert Glasper for Kevin Hays (Mr. Payton’s regular pianist, who appears with him on his new album on the Nonesuch label, “Into the Blue”), was well-rehearsed, very familiar with the leader’s original music, and good to go.

Mr. Payton’s current mode is lightly electric, and it’s important that the addition of just one electronic instrument, in this case a keyboard, gives the band a vaguely fusion-esque texture, even though there’s no guitar and the rest of the group is acoustic (even the bass). The use of a percussionist (Daniel Sadownick) with a full, pan-Afro-Latin kit, boosts the group’s level of rhythmic intricacy and recalls the beats of Miles Davis, even though the warm and full sound of Mr. Payton’s trumpet has little in common with Miles’s.

Although Mr. Hays’s keyboard is heard on virtually every track of the album, at the Jazz Standard Mr. Glasper mostly played traditional acoustic piano. This makes sense, as electric keyboards always sound like more of an effect, or something ones wants to hear in the background of an ensemble, rather than for a featured solo. For that reason, the group is more aggressive and biting in person, and more mellow and laid-back on the album. In either mode, though, it’s entirely agreeable.

The use of electronics and comparatively subtle funk rhythms is hardly surprising in the larger context of Mr. Payton’s career, which includes 10 very diverse albums as a leader even though he’s only 34. His current music, however, caught me totally off guard at two points: Halfway through the opening show, as he came to the conclusion of his own tune, “Triptych,” Mr. Payton lunged unexpectedly into “The Days of Wine and Roses.” Ironically, this song, which was dismissed as easy listening when it was a hit for Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, inspired the thorniest, hardest-edged performance of the evening, with Mr. Payton working mostly in a trio mode with the bassist Vicente Archer and the trap drummer Marcus Gilmore. When Mr. Glasper came in to solo, he, like Mr. Payton, laid down highly abstract improvised lines that would certainly not be easily associated with Mercer or Mancini.

Also surprising is the amount of singing Mr. Payton is now doing: “The Backwards Step,” composed by his father, Walter Payton (currently the bassist with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band), is heard instrumentally on the album, but Mr. Payton used it as the set opener on Wednesday with something like a vocal. It wasn’t exactly singing — more like chanting in some unidentified language of the African diaspora; even when he switched to English, it still seemed more like an incantation than a lyric. Mr. Payton’s current repertoire also includes an original approximation of a traditional torch ballad, “Blue” (on the album), and a jolly, backbeat-driven street parade song, “I Wanna Stay in New Orleans,” which he played and sang as a coda at Jazz Standard.

Before he reached that point, however, he and Mr. Glasper drove the set to a climax, first with Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting theme to the film “Chinatown” (on which Mr. Glasper, in particular, played more intimately than I’ve ever heard him, with more than a touch of the blues), and then Mr. Payton’s “Concentric Circles.” The latter built to a duel of sorts between the two key soloists, who played overlapping two-bar phrases back and forth and kept the tension mounting. The only suitable way to end the excellent set was with Mr. Payton’s cheerful requiem for his hometown.

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Indeed, this is a great season for New Orleans trumpeters. Mr. Payton’s contemporary, Terence Blanchard, preceded him at the Jazz Standard last week, and right now Keely Smith, the longtime musical and marital partner of Louis Prima, one of the all-time great Crescent City trumpet kings, is in residence at Birdland.

Now admitting to 80 (contradicting most sources, which claim she was born in 1932), Ms. Smith continues to sing as strongly as ever, with nary a hint of vocal decline. The only thing that changes as the years go on and she continues to make semiannual appearances in New York, is that her onstage banter gets steadily raunchier. I’m increasingly convinced that this is a deliberate contrivance on her part: Even as Ms. Smith gets more graphic about how she wants to do the mattress mambo or the pelvic polka with any available male in the joint, her ballads and love songs sound, contrastingly, ever sweeter and more sincere, and she never fails to break your heart with a classic love song like “More Than You Know,” “I Have Dreamed,” or her hit, “I Wish You Love.”

For the current show, Ms. Smith’s key accompanists are her stalwart pianist and expert arranger (and son-in-law), Dennis Michaels, and the exuberant tenor saxophonist Jerry Vivino. This time around, the band is a rocking six-piece in the mold of Sam Butera and the Witnesses, the combo that expertly accompanied Ms. Smith and Prima in days past. Ms. Smith can switch from the vulgar to the romantic to the swinging in less than a heartbeat, as when, in the middle of “That Old Black Magic” (which she sang at the Grammies with Kid Rock earlier this year), she makes reference to a gogootza — Sicilian slang for a variety of hard-shelled eggplant that generally serves as a euphemism for the male sex organ. In her opening show on Tuesday, a fan in the audience presented her with an actual gogootza, wrapped in a ribbon bow, and her eyes lit up, as if no one could have possibly pleased her more.

wfriedwald@nysun.com